Brian Phillips

Over the last several weeks, my mind has swirled about with questions of community, conversation, and neighborliness. I have posed questions to the CiRCE reader community: How do we remake the lost places of conversation? What does it mean to be neighborly? What is real community? I cannot say, for sure, if I have answered […]

“It may be very difficult for modern people to imagine a world in which men are not generally admired for covetousness and crushing their neighbors; but I assure them that such strange patches of an earthly paradise do really remain on earth.” – G.K. Chesterton My students and I spend many hours wrestling with “big”

Dr. Gary Greenberg has spent five years looking at sand. After combing through thousands of grains with acupuncture needles, Greenberg found the most magnificent specimens and, using a method of close-up photography he developed specifically for the tiny rocks, he captured these breathtaking pictures: He said, “It is incredible to think when you are walking

Truly valuable questions are stubborn, refusing to leave your mind at peace with simple answers. In some cases, even time will not make them go away. My mind has been occupied of late with questions of community and connectedness and they simply will not leave me alone. What is real community? What does it look

Some believe the tradition of New Year’s Resolutions goes back as far as the second century B.C. Janus, a mythical king of Rome, stood at the head of the calendar with his two faces looking back on past events and forward to the future. King Janus eventually became the ancient symbol for resolutions. Some Romans

Origins I didn’t mean to become a humanities teacher. I blame the stories. Having fallen in love with classical languages in college, I seized the opportunity to teach Latin at a classical school. My only obstacle was that I didn’t actually know Latin. I knew Greek, had even taught it, but Latin was a foreign